TIMOTHY CHEEK
The initial phases of the post-Mao reform period in China began with a coup in October 1976 and ended with military repression in June 1989. It also started with the CCP leadership promising a “liberation of thought” and closed with demands for more political voice from a broader public. Throughout these dozen years China opened more and more to the world beyond the Communist bloc, society relaxed, and the economy grew. The reforms and the various reactions to them that shaped this history grew out of the experience and challenges of the Mao period—the economic disaster of the Great Leap Forward (1958–60) and the social dislocations of the Cultural Revolution decade (1966–76). The reforms were intended to correct the errors of Mao’s final years, rebuild the Communist Party, and improve life for all Chinese. The results were mixed: the Party survived, China’s economy grew, but new social forces were released leading to the great confrontation and crisis of Tiananmen in 1989, the main subject of the next chapter.
The reform was engineered by the CCP leadership but shaped by responses from among both Party factions and social groups. Three phases of reform and response define the political history of this period: succession politics (1975–78), reform efforts (1980–86), and political stalemate (1986–88). This history of reform–reaction–readjustment profoundly changed the lives of Party members, intellectuals, economic elites, rural society, and popular culture. While reform came to an impasse by early 1989, by the end of the first long decade of reform the essential features of the model of economic openness and authoritarian rule that has overseen China’s tremendous economic growth into the third decade of the twenty-first century were laid down. The economic plan endorsed by the CCP in 1987 set the model of authoritarian state capitalism, a system that mixes market economy elements with tight political control and only the partial privatization of State Owned Enterprises (SOEs). The political will to follow through took the struggles of the next decade to resolve, and the social consequences—particularly in official corruption and a staggering gap between rich and poor—remain unresolved.
Politics: succession, reform, and stalemate
China’s economic reforms began after the failures of the Great Leap in the early 1960s, but were cut short by the Cultural Revolution. They were revived in 1972, following the rapprochement with the United States, but again sidelined by central political struggles, as various political groups within the CCP positioned themselves for the anticipated succession crisis—who would take over from Mao? At the Fourth National People’s Congress in 1975 it seemed the bureaucratic “moderates” would prevail under the ailing Premier Zhou Enlai. Deng Xiaoping was brought back from disgrace to manage the economy. But Zhou died in January 1976 and the “radicals” around Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, took the initiative and pressed for a return to radical Cultural Revolution policies of “all-round dictatorship of the proletariat.” When Mao died in September those political struggles were quickly resolved in the arrest and purge of Madame Mao and her colleagues, now dubbed “The Gang of Four.”
The three major forces within the Party—the radicals, the bureaucratic survivors, and the old leadership (soon to be officially rehabilitated)—cobbled together a succession plan. Mao was buried with great pomp and ceremony and a huge mausoleum built for him in Tiananmen Square. The slogans and images of the Cultural Revolution would be continued under a new Chairman, the distinctly uncharismatic Hua Guofeng, but the substantive policies of the radical decades would be reversed, the technocratic policies of the 1963 Four Modernizations (in Industry, Agriculture, National Defense, and Science & Technology) revived, and the purged Party leaders and cadres rehabilitated and reinstated. However, beyond a firm commitment to avoid any more of the chaos of the previous decades and to restore some predictability to political life there was no consensus among this collective leadership on what reform would look like.
The succession was resolved in December 1978 when a major Party conclave endorsed Deng Xiaoping as Vice-Chairman and put into leadership positions rehabilitated colleagues supportive of him. Deng undertook several key political reforms. His first and fundamental act was to restore Leninist administrative order and put an end to charismatic leadership—that is, rule by Party committee. Deng refused to take up Mao’s mantle as “Chairman.” Since Deng Xiaoping held acknowledged revolutionary credentials among his colleagues, he could and did use his revolutionary charisma to blunt the public charisma of the Party Chairman, thereby sidelining Hua Guofeng. This required the Party apparatus to return to its earlier Leninist norms of collective leadership under the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CCP, now the highest post in China. The first new General Secretary was Hu Yaobang, appointed at the same Twelfth Congress of the CCP in 1982 that abolished the position of Chairman. The reform era CCP is not a democratic party, but it is an organized one with bureaucratic hierarchy and lines of authority. This has produced the coherent and resilient government that has overseen China’s reforms for nearly four decades.
Deng Xiaoping’s second attack on charismatic leadership was a careful de-Maoification, enshrined in the June 1981 “Historical Resolution” passed by the Central Committee. Its main purpose was to lay the Cultural Revolution to rest and to account for Mao’s failings without undermining his role as the legitimization of the CCP. To discredit Mao utterly would be to make the mistake of Khrushchev who undermined the CPSU in the Soviet Union with his accurate denunciations of Stalin. The resolution lays down a narrative, a way to think about China’s revolutionary history that begins with a litany of achievements of Party rule up to 1966—going lightly over the disasters of the Great Leap—and admitting the responsibility of Mao and the collective leadership for the errors of the Cultural Revolution. Collective leadership and Party organization are the theme of the Historical Resolution—claiming the organizational side of Maoism and laying aside the charismatic parts.
Putting Mao in his historical place did not mean the end of ideology. This key document for reform of China is all about ideology; the issue was simply which sort of ideology the CCP should follow. “Many outstanding leaders of our Party made important contributions to the formation and development of Mao Zedong Thought,” the Historical Resolution declares, “and they are synthesized in the scientific works of Comrade Mao Zedong…” The collective nature of this body of political wisdom is emphasized in order to justify not only the relevance of Mao Zedong Thought but also to certify the surviving leaders: they were contributors to this ideology and thus are the legitimate leaders of China. The prophet is gone, but the Church remains.
Reform as experimentation
Deng Xiaoping’s reforms did not go smoothly. In addition to the internal contradictions between social and economic relaxation while maintaining political control, the Four Modernizations program was bedeviled by residual political resistance among the leadership and rank and file who either felt the de facto capitalist nature of the reforms was a repudiation of socialism and Mao’s ideals or, regardless of ideological niceties, saw their privileges threatened. These people coalesced around the senior figure, Chen Yun, the only Party leader of rank, experience, and prestige to challenge Deng Xiaoping’s position—even though the two leaders were not necessarily competitors politically. Throughout the 1980s these two “political parties” within the CCP contested. Deng Xiaoping, however, was a wily politician, second only to Mao in his ability to manipulate the Chinese political system. Putting in his protégé, Hu Yaobang, as the General Secretary left Deng as the king maker and arbiter as the forces around the Party reformers and Party traditionalists debated goals, put forward policies, and tried to subvert each other’s programs. After many ups and downs, social changes in China gave market-oriented reforms the edge despite the political stalemate in the late 1980s and the turmoil of Tiananmen.
The Third Plenum in 1978 set Deng Xiaoping’s reform goals. First, it made economic modernization the central goal of Party work. Second, it began to address the wounds of the Cultural Revolution by reversing verdicts on Party cadres who had been purged by Mao. Third, the plenum approved experimentation with market forces, beginning the breaking open of the Planned Economy. The slogan from that time was “practice”—and would produce the key slogan of the 1980s, “practice is the sole criterion of truth.” These policies were implemented over the next few years in a series of administrative changes designed to “open” China to the world market and to extricate the CCP from daily management of farming, factories, and business.
The heart of this first wave of reforms was decollectivization, in which the communes established in the late 1950s were broken up. This was formalized in the 1983 Responsibility System. Land was not returned to the individual farmer, but to the natural village, which, in turn, leased individual family farming plots for at first fifteen years (and by the 1990s up to fifty years). In the cities, reform in the State Owned Enterprises was much slower, but management authority was given to enterprise managers, along with some freedom to keep profits above the State Plan and some responsibility to cover their unit’s own debts. Party leaders could not agree on whether to adjust the centrally planned economy or give over to a market system. Piecemeal policies pushed first for more enterprise reform and then retrenched to more central planning. There was considerable confusion.
In addition to rural and industrial reform, the Party began to experiment with administrative reform. In the countryside, it replaced the administrative role of the 55,000 People’s Communes with 96,000 rural townships, making this lowest level of formal administration more effective by having to care for a smaller population. Administrative reform also included the promise of more citizenship participation by allowing some a small degree of democracy. But what this meant was not entirely clear at first. For example, there were local elections in municipal districts within Beijing in the early 1980s, but the Party subsequently got nervous and reverted to administrative appointment of local leaders.
Reactions to reform
The issue of democracy became one of the first challenges to the leadership arising from the unanticipated consequences of reform. Mao Zedong, after all, had declared the Cultural Revolution to be a form of “big democracy” for the revolutionary masses. In the 1980s, the challenges to Party policies started at the top, among China’s prestigious intellectuals inside the Party and its major universities. Hot debates on the reform of socialism, advocating socialist humanism and Party reform, as well as exposing in detail the errors of the Great Leap and Cultural Revolution, scandalized the political public in China’s cities. The Party traditionalists feared that too much criticism would bring a chaos similar to that of the Cultural Revolution. The result was a political seesaw of thaw and repression.
In 1978 Democracy Wall in Beijing caught worldwide attention. Could China be going democratic already? For some heady weeks in December 1978, Beijing residents could stroll down to the Xidan district and read astonishing posters that talked about the (until recently) unmentionable: the abuses of the Cultural Revolution. These were the same “big character posters” that Red Guards had used in the Cultural Revolution to denounce “capitalist roaders” and “Soviet revisionists” inside the Party, but now this form of Maoist democracy was turned on the abuses and suffering of the Cultural Revolution and pointedly called upon the CCP to make amends. “Democracy,” declared a wall-poster by Wei Jingsheng, an electrician at the Beijing Zoo, “is the fifth modernization!” China seemed, in the words of one journalist, Roger Garside, to be “coming alive.”
During his visit to the United States in 1979 to celebrate the recognition of China by the world’s dominant economy and power, Deng Xiaoping let the press wonder about Democracy Wall. Domestically, the revelations of abuses of power by the radical leadership also served to discredit remaining leaders in the CCP who were closely associated with the Cultural Revolution and who were standing in the way of Deng’s reforms. However, in spring 1979, Democracy Wall was unceremoniously moved to a small park in western Beijing and those who wished to put up posters had to register their name and address with the authorities. By fall, the leaders of Democracy Wall (most notably Wei Jingsheng) were arrested, tried, and jailed. Public advocacy of political democracy of the liberal or parliamentary sort came to an end then, as Deng Xiaoping laid down the Four Cardinal Principles in March 1979 (which insisted that all public acts should uphold socialism and support Party leadership). It became clear from this example that Deng Xiaoping’s tolerance of political free speech was tactical rather than substantive. It also became clear that the Party could and would shut down inconvenient public speech or assembly by force.
Intellectual agitation for change moved to the safer channels of the Party press, think tanks, and universities. These establishment channels frightened the Party much less. Indeed, various leaders hurried to gather together their own think tanks and professors to “research” their policy preferences. In the early 1980s reform intellectuals backed by one or another Party leader pushed for a latitudinarian interpretation of Maoism that focused on the need to protect individual and collective rights against the abuses of those in power. These debates were the public face of inner-Party divisions over the nature and directions of reform: was the planned economy to remain? Were markets to take over? What would be the role of the CCP? Of Maoism?
These debates were also national in character. The public sphere of reform China is a “directed public sphere.” Press and public discussion is managed by the CCP’s propaganda department. In the 1980s Party control was still total—press, radio, and very soon TV, were centrally controlled and heavily censored. The major newspapers were limited—People’s Daily, Guangming Daily, and Liberation Daily—but they were available more or less for free everywhere. As the central leadership experimented and argued over reform, these tools of propaganda became avenues for public discussion that were much livelier and more varied than had been the case under Mao. In short, when an intellectual or policy adviser, such as Liu Binyan or Wang Ruoshui (whom we will meet, below), could get an article into the People’s Daily, it was read by not only intellectuals and professionals across China, but also workers, farmers, and cadres in the villages. This was not a free public sphere, but it was a coherent national public space. While the proposals and suggestions that survived the censor’s pen were incremental rather than revolutionary, they reached the broadest possible audience and built a public presumption that reform was good, necessary, and required being open to taking chances.
Meanwhile, by 1985 the economy was in trouble. The flurry of economic energy released by rural decollectivization slowed by 1984 and the government’s abolition of mandatory grain purchases in 1985 depressed agricultural prices. Farmers began to be squeezed by the classic scissors effect—rising costs for inputs (fertilizer and pesticides) and falling price for produce. Farmers began to look to sideline industries for more cash, to move away from grain to specialized crops, and to migration to the towns and cities for urban employment. Importantly, farmers experienced these changes as a promise broken and they complained. In the cities, the transition to a more market-oriented economy was painful, as well. The incentive system for enterprises, involving relaxation of the planned economy and price controls, led to overheating of the economy and a surge of inflation by 1985. The response of the CCP leadership, under Premier Zhao Ziyang, was put forth in April 1986 as the Seventh Five-Year Plan. Rated by scholars as one of the most realistic and sound plans ever promulgated in China, Zhao proposed further extension of market mechanisms, in essence a gradual “growing out of the plan,” as economist Barry Naughton has described it, under the slogan “socialist commodity market.”
Stalemate
Politics, however, intervened. The trouble was not on the streets or in the salons, it was in the halls of power and stemmed from the incomplete de-Maoification of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms. There were strong forces inside the CCP and the military that were not happy with such reform plans. Three major groups opposed reform. First, the leaders and officials who ran the planned economy. They found their advocate in the senior leader Chen Yun. He supported a role for the market, but only in support of the Plan. This group worried about lower grain production, the growing gap between the developing coastal regions and the interior provinces, and the explosion of corruption which they saw as a result of more liberalized policies and contact with the West. To this group, reform was leading to chaos. Second, orthodox Party leaders such as Peng Zhen worried about the consequences of reform for the social fabric of China. This group took seriously the moral claims of Maoism and saw in the vibrant but uncontrolled changes of the early 1980s the “corrosive influence of decadent bourgeois ideology and remnant feudal ideas.” While no supporters of radical Maoism, these members of the Party’s ideological organizations still believed in “socialist spiritual civilization” and saw the need for the Party to educate the public and protect the weak from the ravages of bourgeois markets. Of course, they felt that they themselves were best suited to undertake this task as teachers of society. Third, senior military leaders also held to a similar socially conservative version of Maoism. They didn’t like the “disorder” of the newly freed social life and even less did they like recent cuts in their budgets.
Resistance inside the Party to reform coalesced around a leadership fight against Deng’s current successor, General Secretary Hu Yaobang. Demonstrations by students in December 1986, which Hu failed to suppress with sufficient vigour, frightened the Party elite and provided the opportunity to dismiss Hu Yaobang in January 1987 and to slow down reform. This success for the Party traditionalists also saw the public “Anti-Bourgeois Liberalization” campaign that, amongst other things, expelled reformist editor Wang Ruoshui. This 1987 retrenchment against market and political reform succeeded in having Hu Yaobang criticized and purged. However, unlike the practice of earlier years, Hu was not demonized, humiliated, and imprisoned (or killed). In fact, he maintained his Party membership and comfortable living situation, but he was politically neutralized. In his stead, Deng Xiaoping moved the Premier, Zhao Ziyang, to become the new Party leader (General Secretary). The tensions between Party traditionalists and Party reformers did not lessen; they increased. While Zhao Ziyang was a reformer, his successor as Premier (at the top of the National People’s Congress and state government structure) was a Party conservative, Li Peng. Deng Xiaoping was playing his balancing act.
Yet reform was not to be stopped. As far as political leadership was concerned, this was because Deng Xiaoping remained committed to the basic line of reform: market liberalization, opening to the world, continued Party rule, and no charismatic rubbish. Thus, the Thirteenth Party Congress in October 1987 recommitted to reform under the slogan, “initial stage of socialism.” This odd slogan explained the capitalist market reforms of the CCP in terms of orthodox Marxist-Leninist theory—China had to pass through an actual and developed capitalist mode of production before “fully” coming to socialism. This way of looking at reform policy may seem tortured to outsiders, but it made sense to insiders, as it allowed both economic and administrative reform while maintaining the commitment to the Party’s ordering of society.
The compromise did not hold, mostly because the social consequences of reform sharpened. On the one hand, Party traditionalists were increasingly worried that the Party was losing control of changes in society, on the other hand, new social groups were emerging that pressed for more change.
Society: the costs of “coming alive”
Socially, the two greatest unintended consequences for reform were inflation and official corruption. No one really knew exactly how to shift from a planned economy, where prices for inputs or products are set by economists working for the central state, to an economy where those prices are determined by market exchanges. The government experimented with a two-track price system for industrial enterprises. Basic production operated under the state plan at set prices. Once the quota set by the plan had been met, extra production could be sold at higher market prices and the extra profits could be kept by the enterprise. In one sense, this legitimized the “grey market” for resources that had existed under the plan for years, but the opportunity to exploit the price difference between, say, iron at the plan rate and iron at market rates, was too much for many factory managers or local officials to resist. Profiteering was common and obvious to ordinary Chinese who resented it. Resentment turned to outrage in the face of inflation that cut into the daily lives of urban residents who still lived on fixed work unit incomes. In fact, 1989 saw the worst inflation and the most visible official corruption in China since the founding of the PRC.
The social experience of reform in the 1980s was profound and varied. Life in the Party and for cadres changed, a new business community emerged (albeit in close collaboration with local Party leaders), intellectuals struggled to find their role in public life, while youth developed a new popular culture, and rural life prospered but still struggled.
Party life
Reform saw the power and position of Party cadres change. Under Mao they had been the all-powerful agents of the total state with not only police powers to back up their decisions but daily control over the housing, ration coupons, employment, and health care of those under their charge. Reform in the 1980s both decentralized administrative power from the center to provincial and local authorities and also put much of the everyday necessities of life onto “the market.” Increasingly workers or university graduates could find work independently of the allocation system controlled by local Party leaders. Farming choices and revenues devolved to the peasant household, ration coupons were phased out. To be sure, Party approval for important decisions remained, not least in the required permission to move one’s personnel file from one work unit to another or to approve registration in a new city. However, by the late 1980s being a Party cadre had changed from local lord to local fixer. In this context it was their cultural capital—knowledge of how the system worked, privileged access to forthcoming Party decisions and initiatives, and a fearsome network of connections—that propelled local Party cadres into a new formulation of elites in local China: the Party–business alliance. Working with local business interests (often made of retired or even sitting Party officials), Party cadres could “deliver the goods” (Deng Xiaoping’s call to develop local economies) and also do well for themselves. This required, however, a continuing display of loyalty to the Party and Party norms, slogans, and campaigns. If at the central level, the “King is Dead, Long Live the King!” version of Maoism saw a return to collective leadership, at the local level Party administration under the name of continuing socialism—albeit designated a “primary stage of socialism”—created a new political economy of Party–business collaboration that has continued to today. Some call this crony capitalism but the local Chinese version of this Party–business alliance is far more widespread (numbers of people and range of areas involved) and economically generative than simple favours for friends of the national elite. It is both corrupt and, so far, effective.
The CCP began its transformation to a modern authoritarian regime in the 1980s. The excesses of charismatic leadership were curtailed, though the commitment to guiding ideology and “the thought” of the current top leader remained. Nationally, the balance of power between central and regional authorities was adjusted, beginning with decentralization in 1984 (and counter-balanced by fiscal recentralization in 1998). Locally, the same devolution of authority put more discretion in the hands of township Party secretaries. The trade-off at all levels was clear: the local leader gets more leeway but is also now personally responsible for the results. China went from one dictator to 10,000 who had to live cheek by jowl with those over whom they ruled. Socially, the Party in the 1980s began its retreat from the full-fledged Propaganda State of the Mao period. More like Taiwan under Chiang Kai-shek in the 1960s, Chinese were offered much more personal latitude and increasing market or consumer freedom. In exchange they needed only to profess loyalty to the current leadership and stay out of political trouble. No more thought reform, no more “struggle campaigns.” It was not freedom in the sense of a legally protected civil society, but most Chinese experienced this political relaxation as a “second liberation.”
Business and commerce
China under Mao had been a planned economy with all economic actors owned either by local collectives or by the state. Deng Xiaoping’s reforms returned a measure of private business in China by allowing small businesses and permitting foreign businesses to invest in China. The Joint Venture law of 1979 began the process of bringing in capital and know-how from Western and Asian firms by allowing co-investment in a Chinese business. Domestically, the surplus labor power of rural China was engaged in Township Village Enterprises (TVEs). The old workshops, mills, and handicraft sheds of the communes were converted into semi-commercial enterprises that sold their agricultural equipment, soya sauce, or fertilizer on the market. Approved in 1984, TVEs grew from 1.3 million to 6 million that year and reached some 23 million by the end of the “Golden Decade” of TVEs in 1996. In all, TVEs provided 135 million jobs and produced one third of China’s industrial output in the early 1990s.
The stars of Deng’s reforms were the Special Economic Zones. These were export processing zones that enticed foreign investment with promises of low wages, little red tape, and tax incentives. They were modeled on Taiwan’s successful export processing zone in Kaohsiung that had opened in 1966 and spurred the island’s spectacular economic development. The first four SEZs were established in China in 1980 with Shenzhen, a sleepy village on the border of Hong Kong as the test case (the other three were: Zhuhai, Shantou, and Xiamen—all in Guangdong or neighboring Fujian province). In 1984 preferential terms for foreign investment were extended to a further fourteen cities—up and down the coast from Manchuria in the north to Hainan Island in the south. By 1988 trade and exports were booming. China’s foreign trade soared from US$21 billion in 1978 to US$166 billion in 1992. The SEZs became the home of over 5,000 companies authorized to conduct foreign trade—in 1978 under the planned economy there had been exactly 12 authorized trading firms.
These new, globally engaged firms began to change the face of Chinese society. Private business had been banned in Mao’s China as capitalist exploitation. But Deng Xiaoping had declared, “To Get Rich is Glorious!” Now business people were “entrepreneurs” contributing to “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” And they were not alone. Domestically, plucky farmers and workers set up their own small businesses as street vendors, petty traders, and curb-side repair services. Known as getihu, these small-scale independent business operators quickly filled the consumer and service needs of urban populations tired of the limited offerings, long lines, and poor service of state-run retail outlets. At the same time the getihu were viewed with suspicion by local Party officials who resented the devolution of market access to these parvenus. Customers also viewed them with ambivalence, fearing these hucksters were somehow cheating them. The fabulous rise in wealth of some clever getihu would engender the resentment of Beijing students in the late 1980s who blamed the Party for allowing such “cheaters” to prosper.
Intellectuals and popular culture
The 1980s saw the final efforts of China’s establishment intellectuals to act out their role as servants to the state and teachers of the people. A range of talented, thoughtful, and daring intellectuals committed to their service as Party members spoke up forthrightly to address the errors of the past and the challenges of the present. Their reception was decidedly mixed and by decade’s end they had been silenced. With the waning of their establishment role, intellectuals turned to the emerging cultural realm that was growing in the newly allowed sphere of commercial media. A “culture craze” in the 1980s shook intellectual and Party circles alike. Whether speaking for the Party or from society, 1980s intellectuals maintained their role as teachers of the people in search of a “total” answer to China’s problems—the same form of ideology they had learned under Mao, but with changing content.
Liu Binyan (1925–2005) was a Party journalist for whom the experience of the Cultural Revolution demanded that he push Party reform further than simply as a return to the status quo of the early 1960s. Liu reflects the success of Mao’s efforts to get intellectuals back into touch with the common people. “Fate brought us into intimate contact with the lowest levels of the laboring masses; our joys and worries became for a time the same as their own. Our hopes were no different from theirs.” And yet, Liu assumes an elite role: “This experience allowed us to see, to hear, and to feel for ourselves things that others have been unable to see, hear, or feel.” Liu was confident that if writers had been allowed to speak the truth of their experiences “they would have helped the Party to see its mistakes while there was still time to make changes.” It was a call to let intellectuals and professionals do their work without political blinders.
Wang Ruoshui (1926–2002), a theorist working in the People’s Daily, set out to provide the ideological platform for the reforms by promising to create “Marxian humanism.” The key term in Wang’s reformist Marxist analysis was “alienation.” In Marxist theory this is the “alienation” of labor that workers experience under capitalism—commonly referred to as “exploitation”—that drives their struggle for socialist revolution. Under Stalin and Mao, the Communists declared that this alienation was a thing of the past under the glorious rule of the Party. Wang spoke for a generation of Party intellectuals who survived the Cultural Revolution and they disagreed. In a piece translated by the Sinologist David Kelly, he wrote:
In the past, we did many stupid things in economic construction due to our lack of experience…. And in the end we ate our own bitter fruit; this is alienation in the economic realm.… [T]he people’s servants sometimes made indiscriminate use of the power conferred on them by the people, and turned into their masters; this is alienation in the political realm. As for alienation in the intellectual realm, the classic example is the personality cult…
Wang’s critique of the “personality cult” pointed to Mao, of course. Wang saw the personality cult as the willing transfer to the leader of powers and dignities that rightfully belonged to “the people.” Wang Ruoshui was no dissident. He was part of what has been called the “counter-elite” in Eastern Europe in the 1980s, in-house critics within Communist Parties. Indeed, Wang Ruoshui and his colleagues were aware of developments in Eastern Europe and cited their writings. We often think of Communism as monolithic, but this was not.
Fang Lizhi (1926–2012) went further. By the 1980s Fang was an internationally respected astrophysicist and a vice-president of China’s prestigious Science and Technology University. His experiences as a victim of both the anti-rightist campaign in the late 1950s and in the Cultural Revolution radicalized him: he had had it with Party ideology; he trusted in science. In 1986 Fang spoke to demonstrating students in Shanghai on democracy and the role of students and intellectuals. “If you want to understand democracy,” Fang advised, “look at how people understand it in developed countries.” According to Fang, the root of democracy resided in “the rights of each individual.” Fang implored the students to stand up for themselves and for the good of China: “the most crucial thing of all is to have a democratic mentality and a democratic spirit.” He wanted the students to apply the scientific attitude to politics. Fang Lizhi, who had recently travelled to Europe, held up European universities as bastions of intellectual freedom protected both from government meddling and pressures from big business. “The intellectual realm must be independent and have its own values,” Fang declared. This was a frontal attack on the establishment intellectual role. Fang concluded, “We must refuse to cater to power. Only when we do this will Chinese intellectuals be transformed into genuine intellectuals.” Although supported by the reformist leadership under Hu Yaobang, in the end all three reformist Party intellectuals were purged in 1987 in the “Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign.”
Meanwhile, intellectual effort moved to the emerging public sphere of commercial publishing and TV. The newest generation of youth in high schools and universities and the emerging popular culture, now somewhat freed from total direction by the Party, created a “culture craze” in the mid-1980s that sought to explore and discuss the cultural roots of China’s problems and to promote a “New Enlightenment” movement. While popular in the sense of being non-governmental, these groups of students and intellectuals were largely speaking to each other, and to Party sponsors behind the scenes. The new mood reached the mass media in part through the book series published by these groups, which turned out to sell quite well, and also through TV and film, most notably the controversial 1986 TV series, River Elegy and new films like Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth in 1984 and Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum in 1987. These films drew from the emerging mood of critical fiction (Zhang Yimou’s film was based on Mao Yan’s 1986 novel of the same name). Writers such as Su Tong (b. 1963), Yu Hua (b. 1960), and Mo Yan (b. 1955) probed the psychology of their generation’s experiences through the Cultural Revolution. Together they re-tell the story of China’s revolution in dark and complicated terms, focusing on individuals, families, and ironic twists of fate rather than the drama of class struggle and the “shining road” of Socialism.
Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s short stories offered a voice for the children who grew up when the Cultural Revolution came to their town. Their stories will remind English readers more of Lord of the Flies than Tom Sawyer or Catcher in the Rye. Su Tong’s 1990 novel that became the film Raise High the Red Lantern (1991) takes the critique of Chinese culture to gender politics in the story of four concubines in an unnamed time that focuses on culture and gender oppression rather than national politics. Meanwhile, Wang Shuo (b. 1958), most famous for Playing for Thrills (1989), scandalized the reading public with irreverent and pugnacious stories of working-class life, introducing “hooligan literature.” These were the backdrop of youth and popular culture when a series of events would catapult a million students into Tiananmen Square in defiance of the Party in spring 1989.
The most widely viewed example of the 1980s culture craze was the TV program River Elegy. It condemned China’s traditional civilization, as symbolized by the Yellow River, the Great Wall, and the dragon, for stifling China’s creativity. The series had vivid imagery that conveyed the sense that China, like the Yellow River, once at the forefront of civilization, had dried up because of its emphasis on stability, isolation, and conservatism. By contrast, it showed flowing blue seas as symbolizing the exploring, open culture of the West and Japan. The series also used documentary footage from the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. The juxtaposition of images and statements created a subtext equating Maoist-Stalinist orthodoxy with state Confucianism and traditional culture—and both were portrayed as disasters. The solution to China’s problems, it suggested, was to abandon this “yellow earth” and embrace the “blue world” of the sea, commerce, and contact with the outside world. According to China Central Television (CCTV) statistics, over 200 million people saw the series.
Television was not the only new resource open to intellectuals in the late 1980s. The beginnings of independent organizations emerged, weakening the establishment intellectual model. A notable example is Chen Ziming (b. 1950) who had participated in the 1976 Tiananmen marches known as the April 5th movement. He published in the “Beijing Spring” of 1979 but went to university to study chemistry, training at the Biophysics Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Throughout, Chen stayed politically engaged and he tried to interest his university and political leaders in reform. He was rebuffed, and for his pains was punished by not receiving a good job placement. Chen subsequently became one of the first dis-established intellectuals, an accidental intellectual entrepreneur. In 1985 Chen and his wife, Wang Zhihong, set up two private correspondence schools that taught business skills to administrators. It was successful and lucrative. In the fall of 1986, they established the Social and Economic Research Institute, the first non-official political think tank in Beijing. In 1988, Chen and Wang bought a trade magazine, Economic Weekly, which nonetheless came with official registration—giving them a legal outlet for publishing. Chen proceeded to turn this pedestrian trade magazine into a forum on a broad range of social and political topics. While the magazine was non-establishment, it still published establishment intellectuals working for reformist think tanks and aimed at Party reformers. Nonetheless, Chen’s and Wang’s independent think tank and magazine were a first for Chinese intellectuals since the demise of liberal organizations and the nationalization of their periodicals in the early 1950s.
Rural communities
China’s reforms began by addressing the glaring gap between urban and rural development. The effort in the 1980s began well, ran into trouble by mid-decade, and entered the 1990s by privileging some areas (near cities and the coast) over others. From the start more wealth was generated under the reforms but at the cost of producing huge gaps between regions—with coastal areas booming and hinterland regions declining. Broadly speaking, per capita income between the early 1980s and early 1990s grew twice as fast for urban residents as for rural, and the average income for urban Shanghai was about eight times greater than that for rural Gansu. Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in the countryside began with the decollectivization of farmland, the household responsibility system. By 1982 these were under the supervision of the revived townships. By 1984 cropping contracts to individual farm families were guaranteed for fifteen years. This allowed farming families to make their own farming choices and to engage in sideline production. Private markets were once again tolerated. At the same time, the state subsidized agriculture by spending over 1 billion Yuan (US$125 million) to keep the price of grain up for farmers but down for urban consumers.
While the promise of markets brought welcome opportunity to rural families, it was the state subsidies and broader market forces that determined the slide back into poverty for much of rural China. By 1984 the state could no longer afford the subsidies for grain and so ended mandatory purchases. The price of rice fell, along with other staples, and rural communities that had seen a burst of wealth—and new construction—in recent years then came upon hard times. New production quotas for grain were introduced at low prices (that the state could afford). The net result was that many farmers quit farming, or limited it to subsistence, and stalked off the land to the cities to try their luck. In the late 1980s this was only a trickle but since the 1990s this migrant labor, now a “floating population” of 200 million, has defined both urban life and the rural communities to which it sends remittances. At the same time, rural industrialization in the TVEs mitigated these pressures somewhat.
China’s reforms began with essentially the neo-liberal promise that privatization and an open market would bring prosperity to rural China. As has been the case elsewhere, the market alone has not been able to deliver such economic dynamism with equity. Realities of institutional heritage (the tangle of land claims from Mao’s communes), price supports (and their removal), and gendered access to work in the cities had far more impact on most rural Chinese than the small number of market-gardeners in the suburbs of big cities who made small fortunes. The rural experience of reform has been that the market has helped, but the market alone is not enough, and the market alone can be disastrous for many.
One of the major social policies of the reform era was the one child policy. First articulated in 1979 and implemented harshly in the early 1980s this policy set out to forestall what scientists in China saw as a looming demographic disaster of over-population. Mao had famously declared that the more people there were in China, the better. In the post-Mao turn to science and evidence-based policy, the Party turned to the only active scientists still in their labs at the end of the Cultural Revolution: military scientists and, literally, rocket scientists working under the policy entrepreneur, Song Jiang. Using computers, cybernetics, and advanced statistical analysis—but not consulting varying conditions in rural China—these scientists advised stringent limits on births. It got results: birth per woman fell from 2.9 in 1979 to 1.7 in 2004. During the 1980s there became an ongoing tension between the realities of rural life (in which farming families need sons to continue the family line and, due to the prevalence of patrilocal marriage, both work the land and provide for care for elders in old age) and Party officials. Some rural families were reduced to “washing the baby”: drowning an infant daughter in hopes of being able to have a boy. Famously, or rather infamously, in some areas there were forced abortions and sterilizations (of women, not men). The long-term consequences would be seen in the twenty-first century with a distorted male-female ratio of 115:100 and a resultant lack of marriage partners for men.
Legacies of the 1980s
The reforms of the 1980s began as a revival of earlier adjustments, the Four Modernizations program first announced in 1963 and revived in 1977. The effects of the Cultural Revolution and the changed international environment of the 1980s transformed those reforms fundamentally. The Party of 1980 was not the Party of 1963. There was no more Mao, faith in the Party was greatly diminished both inside and outside the CCP, everyone was ready for a change and more freedom from political pressure, and localities had learned it was possible to lie to the center and get away with it and that, fundamentally, they were on their own. In a way, everyone had learned “self-reliance” from Mao but it was a reliance that taught people to manipulate the Party and, in years ahead, the market and the law. This was the birth of China’s political secularization, the “disenchantment” with the old order that the German sociologist Max Weber, writing in the early years of the twentieth century, saw as the prerequisite for modernization in Europe. The late 1980s began the search for another order, something to believe in.
The reforms of the 1980s delivered the makings of a workable economic model and authoritarian state with land reform and partial privatization of SOEs but had not yet settled on a stable political solution to the stalemate of Mao’s last years. Thus, the 1980s saw the end of the Propaganda State and its ruinous political campaigns. However, it did not see the end of the Party, of ideology, or of a directed public sphere (albeit this last was now more nimbly managed). Most ominously, the Party had not found a way to achieve leadership unity on how to proceed with reform. Those committed to further market reform and political decentralization could not convince nor could they outmanoeuver those committed to a planned economy and Party rule. This leadership struggle contributed to the Party’s inability to respond effectively to public demonstration in Beijing in 1989.
Intellectuals began the reforms as reinstated establishment intellectuals: servants to the state and teachers to the people. Daring journalists like Liu Binyan sought to “be a voice for the people.” Theorists like Wang Ruoshui sought to recast the guiding ideology in terms of “Marxian humanism.” But others had already begun the transition from establishment intellectuals to something else—roles that would only emerge in the 1990s. Those who moved on were, in fact, shoved by the Party: expelled or sidelined. Fang Lizhi was first demoted, then expelled from the Party for putting science and democracy over ideology and the Party. Chen Ziming only became an intellectual entrepreneur when his normal employment (through the state allocation system) was denied as punishment for his unorthodox ways. In the late 1980s to be ostracized from the establishment limited an intellectual’s public role (as almost all media was still firmly in the hands of the propaganda authorities).
The life of China and the life of ordinary Chinese in the 1980s began their engagement with the broader family of nations and the international commercial market beyond the limited, and ailing, socialist camp of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. This was China’s entry to the current round of globalization. The PRC had taken up the China seat in the UN in 1971, but normalization of relations with the United States in 1979 opened a new era of acceptance and engagement in international organizations. The relative lessening of censorship and slowly increasing flow of foreign students and business people into China and Chinese students overseas to study opened cultural doors for urban Chinese. It began first with those in privileged positions but soon expanded to enterprising Chinese able to surf the tides of new connections with foreign countries, including re-established links with overseas Chinese communities. This contributed to a vibrant youth and popular culture in China’s urban areas rooted in the independence and bitter experience of zhiqing (educated youth), the sent-down youth of the Cultural Revolution. Such a culture was nurtured by the mesmerizing allure of new books, ideas, images, and desirable objects—from fashions to refrigerators—that appeared to come from the outside world. In the 1980s America was El Dorado, the perfect place: perceived as a rich and democratic utopia, where people were (unlike the typical Chinese person’s school or work unit) free to be themselves. It was an infatuation that, as we will see in Chapter 10, saw its peak in Tiananmen in 1989, followed by the inevitable disillusionment in the 1990s, as America turned out to be full of depressingly familiar imperfect people and sometimes took actions abroad that threatened Chinese sovereignty and even at times Chinese lives.